Saturday, January 15, 2011

cleaning and organizing

jeff and i spent a good part of yesterday cleaning and organizing the studio. next weekend he will be teaching his first workshop here in seagrove and we needed the workspace to be organized... this workshop will focus on the altering techniques that jeff uses in his work. jeff loves teaching classes and he is really looking forward to getting back into it. in a past life i taught preschoolers for nearly 20 years and i have been considering offering some kids clay classes this spring or summer.

after the clean up i did manage to start working on some wall tiles that i plan to raku fire along with all the beads and pendants i have in the works...

Raku is cool, beautiful tiles. I always wanted to put tiles in my barrel firings and never tried it because I thought they'd crack, now I'm thinking clay is sometimes stronger than it looks, Are the tiles hard to get off the shelf when you raku them? Or do you lean them against something so you can pick them up with the tongs. You know me, I'm eternally curious.

usually they get leaned against the wall of the kiln. our raku kilns are made out of an old electric kilns. when i first made tiles and raku fired them they were too thin and cracked. so now i make them beefy.

When i used the type of fiber kiln that lifts off of the pots, I would lean the tiles against a brick in the center, and then against each other like a house of cards without a roof...and then set a pot on the brick.